Vaucasy
n.
the fear that you’re little more than a product of your circumstances, that for all the thought you put into shaping your beliefs and behaviors and relationships, you’re essentially a dog being trained by whatever stimuli you happen to encounter—reflexively drawn to whoever gives you reliable hits of pleasure, skeptical of ideas that make you feel powerless.
From Jacques de Vaucanson, a French engineer who built a series of lifelike programmable machines (automata), including his masterpiece the Digesting Duck, which could flap its wings and quack, drink water, and digest bits of grain into simulated excrement. Pronounced “vaw-kuh- see.”
